The Foreign Interference Federal Election - Week Two
Special Edition: A view from out west, where the math isn't mathing
My Scottish/Irish ancestors arrived on the east coast of so-called “Canada” in the early 1800’s and were part of several waves of genocidal colonization of the Indigenous people who were already here. They arrived uninvited on the traditional unceded territory of the Wəlastəkewiyik (Maliseet) whose ancestors along with the Mi’Kmaq / Mi’kmaw and Passamaquoddy / Peskotomuhkati Tribes / Nations signed Peace and Friendship Treaties with the British Crown in the 1700s. I like to start every new post by explaining my family’s history and keeping this foremost in my mind (and my writing) at all times. I know I have benefited as a result of colonization, and I find the history deeply troubling. It is what motivates me to understand the true history and advocate for real reconciliation. As a child in the 1970’s, I moved west with my family and am grateful to be writing this newsletter now in Moh’kinsstis, and the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. This territory is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. I recognize that the land I now work and live on was stolen from these nations (truth) and I support giving the land back as an act of reconciliation. Lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge and knowledge systems are key to designing a sustainable future for all.
Sunday, March 30 - Fumbling and fake ads
The second week of the federal campaign started out badly for Pierre Poilievre. A CBC News report claimed “Conservatives fear 'dysfunctional' campaign and 'civil war' in the party: sources.”
Some conservative strategists were speaking publicly (and others doing so anonymously) about the Poilievre campaign’s ability to pivot to address the threats from Trump directly.
Poilievre is no friend to the CBC, and the Conservatives have called for the news organization to be defunded. His dislike for most media, and perhaps his shortcomings in dealing with them, had already led to a decision to ban journalists from travelling with him as he jets across the country.
Media usually pay their costs in order to travel with candidates for prime minister, but the Poilievre campaign announced it would rather give more attention to local media. Later in the week, journalists who had to trail the campaign via their own arrangements would report on how that was going.
Then, a visit to a shop in Winnipeg to make pizza with his young son had Poilievre fumbling the pizza in a clip that went viral on Instagram just as party insiders were calling for him to get his act together. It was so uncomfortable that some users on Reddit felt bad for him and chided others in the comments for focusing on the minor mishap. There were also the inevitable comparisons to Trump’s visit to McDonald’s or Musk’s appearance in the Oval Office with his kid, neither of which helped Poilievre.
The election is turning into a referendum on Trump and Musk, as much as a choice between Poilievre and Liberal Mark Carney. It will be interesting to see how the campaign handles this over the coming weeks.
Oh, and Poilievre announced he’d bring in an investment tax cut whereby any person or business selling an asset will pay no capital gains tax when they reinvest the proceeds in Canada. This likely got lost in a very busy news cycle.
Carney and his wife went to the home of a Muslim family for an Eid feast, while the CBC was reporting on TikTok about fake election ads targeting Carney. A news article made to look like it was written by the CBC used AI to make a video of Carney pushing a cryptocurrency scheme. This is the world we live in now.
There were no executive orders issued from the White House over the weekend but the short break in the Trump mayhem wouldn’t last long.
Monday, March 31 - A dazzling display
Monday brought the spectacle of Kid Rock in the Oval Office in a red, white and blue stars and stripes suit next to Trump calling for a **checks notes** report in six months on how to deal with ticket scalpers. Not a serious story by any standard.
One social media commentator labelled the images “drag story time at the White House,” which I must admit, made me laugh out loud.
The executive order signing stunt got a lot of media coverage but what didn’t get covered as much was the second order of the day, one that may be described as an invitation to billionaires to come to America and join the plundering.
“The Investment Accelerator shall facilitate and accelerate investments above $1 billion in the United States by assisting investors as they navigate United States Government regulatory processes efficiently, reduce regulatory burdens where consistent with applicable law, increase access to and use of our national resources where appropriate and consistent with applicable law, facilitate research collaborations with our national labs, and work with State governments in all 50 States to reduce regulatory barriers to, and increase, domestic and foreign investment in the United States.”
In other words, if you’ve got a billion dollars, Trump wants your money to be invested in the US, and will ignore all regulation or other barriers, to make it happen. This is the new “New Colossus” where the famous sonnet at the base of the Statue of Liberty sounds more like:
"Give me your wire transfers, your billionaires,
Your star-studded assets, yearning to be free (of regulation),
The wealthiest excesses of your snobby hoard.
Send these, the soulless, cheating-lot to me,
I’ll lift my glass to toast the golden credit card!"
Just be wary of bejewelled rock stars with stretchy red pants appearing at the White House and pay attention to what else might be going on to require a distraction.
With the deadline for nominating candidates in the federal election only a week away, a fair amount of candidate shuffling began. The Liberals removed a candidate, Thomas Keeper, in Calgary for what they described as failing to disclose a 2005 charge of domestic assault laid by his ex-wife. The charges were later stayed but Keeper was shown the door.
The Liberals also announced their housing plan to double the pace of construction to almost 500,000 new homes a year and eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers.
It also became pretty clear that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was going to continue to be a problem for Pierre Poilievre as she deflected criticism for her trip to Florida the previous week to appear at a PragerU fundraising event. On her radio show, she took questions from callers about the trip and defended her approach of putting Alberta’s interests above Canada’s.
Smith was probably very happy to see Poilievre’s announcement of “fast-track approvals for transmission lines, railways, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure across Canada in a pre-approved transport corridor entirely within Canada.”
The idea quickly raised the ire of environmental groups and First Nations who warned it would be unconstitutional. The news release from the Conservative Party made it clear that under Poilievre, the corridor would go ahead, but promised Indigenous groups would see economic benefits. However, the concept of economic reconciliation is divisive among Indigenous people, a fact that Poilievre didn’t acknowledge. The likelihood of agreements with the many diverse groups across the entire country is low.
On Monday evening in the US, Senator Cory Booker stood up and began a speech criticizing the Trump administration. He continued all that night and into the next day — for25 hours and 5 minutes, breaking the previous record for continuously speaking on the Senate floor set by Strom Thurmond, who tried to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957. By the way, that bill passed by a wide margin two hours after Thurmond finished speaking.
Tuesday, April 1 - No joking around
This would have been the day that Trump announced his tariff policy but apparently, someone told him it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch on April 1. Not that the tariff announcement went any better on April 2, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The bad news for Trump was that the candidate he endorsed for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court lost the election there. This happened despite Musk’s attempt to buy the vote, a move that prompted one group to threaten a citizen's arrest when Musk arrived in their state.
A Liberal incumbent and candidate in Ontario voluntarily stepped down. Paul Chiang apologized for suggesting one of his rivals for the job be delivered to the Chinese embassy for a bounty. No joke.
A Conservative candidate, also in Ontario, who once joked that former prime minister Justin Trudeau should receive the death penalty, will no longer be running for the Conservatives. There’s been no word whether Mark McKenzie will still sit as a city councillor in Windsor. He made the comments previously on his podcast and the full story on CTV has a few more of the wild details of what he said.
One person who made it clear he was not joking is Trump, who said again he’s serious about a third term.
Attorney General Pam Bondi also announced a decision to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering the UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.
Several Republican Senators started to speak publicly about their intention to break rank and vote against Trump’s tariffs that same day. Say what you may about these folks, but it likely took a bit of courage considering how serious things are getting with kidnappings, renditions and people full-on being disappeared in America right now.
Senator Booker wrapped up his marathon speech that evening, but unfortunately, there was no vote to impeach Trump (it has been tried several times already, as we all know) and he remains president.
Nothing about today was remotely funny, I’m afraid.
Wednesday, April 2 - Liberation Day
By the time Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” dawned, many stories had surfaced about the three planeloads of people flown to El Salvador’s most violent and horrific prison without any right to challenge the reason for their detention in court.
There was no liberation for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who has been living in the US since 2011. He has a wife and a five-year-old son (both US citizens) and no convictions for any crime. In fact, there was a court order forbidding his return to El Salvador to PROTECT him from the gang.
Abrego Garcia was arrested outside his workplace, detained and deported to El Salvador by mistake, according to the Trump administration. They also told the court there was nothing that could be done to get him back. The president of El Salvador received $6 million for taking in the roughly 300 people. Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary visited the prison last week for a glamour photo shoot with the prisoners, who appear to have been requested to remove their shirts for the picture.
This story and those of hundreds of the others sent to be tortured and possibly killed, is only going to get much, much worse, I guarantee. The administration has not provided proof to journalists that ANY of those on the three planes are gang members, despite repeated requests. Tattoos do not count as evidence in any court.
CBS investigated and says as many as 75% of those renditioned to El Salvador have no criminal record. The others have only minor, non-violent charges.
The Trump administration’s record for truth-telling is not very good. Ask Canadians about fentanyl lies being repeated on a regular basis.
The Globe and Mail reported on Wednesday that the US border agency’s own data shows Canada is not responsible for fentanyl entering America. About one-10th of 1 percent of fentanyl seizures have been attributed to Canada.
Not only does Trump say the opposite but he also claimed he was "tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.” This is demonstrably false.
Having delayed his tariff announcement by one day to avoid looking like a fool, Trump invited everyone to the Rose Garden on the afternoon of April 2 for an outdoor event with his full cabinet in attendance. After being trumpeted in, he proceeded to outline his plan to bring the global economy to its knees.
The joke was on all of us, I guess, since we now know that the taxes on goods from almost every country in the world were calculated based on the difference between exports and imports. Each country’s surplus was then divided in half.
There was no reciprocity in the tariffs because the formula didn’t include the value of actual tariffs levied against American goods by any of the countries. A few countries were singled out, including Canada and Mexico for special consideration due to their existing trade agreement with the US. China’s tariffs were also stacked onto existing penalties. Russia would not be tariffed at all.
The announcement threw global markets into absolute chaos that continued throughout the week. I’ll return to this at the end of this post.
Trump read through some of the first page of an eight-page list of countries while at the microphone, muttering accusations of nastiness, rip-offs, and the need for “tough love.” Throughout, he repeated the lie that tariffs would be paid by the countries. Of course, these were taxes to be paid by Americans if they want to do business with or buy goods from anywhere else other than the US.
Trump paused to throw a MAGA baseball cap into the audience that had been packed with guys in hard hats and orange fluorescent vests. When he finished speaking, the band started up again as he exited the stage lined with American flags. He did not take any questions from the media.
The Financial Times wrote about the day, which they called “Liquidation Day,” with a headline of “So much winning — in 15 charts.”
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Trump succeeded in not looking like a fool.
Thursday, April 3 - Another Signal chat
The day started with this declaration from columnist Edward Alden at Foreign Policy: “Trump’s Wanton Tariffs Will Shatter the World Economy.”
“On Wednesday, Donald Trump declared economic war on the world. Using emergency powers in ways never envisioned by Congress, spinning a history of supposed exploitation by friend and foe, and making up fantastical numbers to quantify his grievances, the U.S. president in one afternoon tore up nearly a century’s worth of efforts to build a mostly peaceful and prosperous global economic order.”
Around the world, stocks went into a nose dive on Thursday, with the major US and Canadian indexes suffering their largest one-day percentage losses since the early days of the pandemic in 2020. According to the Globe and Mail, “a combined US$2.4 trillion in stock market value was wiped off of S&P 500 companies alone.”
If you want to track the disaster unfolding in Canada, The Energy Mix reported on a new tool from Main Street Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI). The CUI tool tracks how the large-scale changes on the world stage affect the “main streets, businesses, and neighbourhoods that feel the immediate consequences.”
In his role as Prime Minister, Mark Carney took a break from campaigning to address Trump’s tariff announcement.
"The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. We must do extraordinary things for ourselves, we must do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven't seen in generations," Carney told reporters.
Automaker Stellantis had already said it would shut down its assembly plant in Windsor, Ont., for two weeks, largely because of the 25% tariffs on imported vehicles. The company said the shutdown would directly impact roughly 3,200 people in Canada.
Poilievre announced that he would take the GST off the sale of new Canadian-made cars and create a targeted, temporary loan and credit program for businesses directly hit by Trump’s tariffs.
Yet again, Poilievre was hit with some embarrassing information about one of his candidates in Ontario. A Press Progress investigation found that Andrew Lawton, a candidate and Poilievre’s official biographer, was in a small chat group with convoy organizers while they occupied downtown Ottawa in 2022.
Meanwhile, top convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were found guilty for their role in the protest. Poilievre can’t seem to escape his past cozying up to the convoy, and the timing couldn’t have been worse for this story about Lawton to break.
Friday, April 4 - More penguins please
With his tariff bombshells delivered, Trump left the White House on Thursday night to take a long weekend and take part in a Saudi-sponsored golf tournament at his private Doral resort outside of Miami. It was probably designed to keep him away from social media where he was being skewered.
On the lighter side, the biggest jokes were around the tariffs levied against a remote island occupied only by penguins. You can never have too many penguins in your news feed, as far as I’m concerned.
There have been no new executive orders since April 2 as markets absorb the news and realize Trump may actually throw the entire world into recession.
The White House issued releases containing nothing but praise for Trump’s “economic policy,” including a lengthy list of many Republican officials congratulating him. They issued another almost identical release the next day, which probably reflected their nervousness about early reaction.
PM Carney announced a counter-tariff of 25% to “mirror” Trump's auto tariffs on Canada, saying that the retaliatory auto tariffs would be implemented on $35 billion worth of American vehicles shipped for sale into Canada. The Chinese government said it would match Trump’s 34% tariff, and also barred a group of American companies from doing business in China.
Carney may also announce further tariffs on pharmaceuticals, lumber and semiconductors.
Rumours were swirling that after the Wisconsin election that Musk was being pushed out of his role with the Department of Government Efficiency, but the White House denied it.
CBC journalists on the campaign trail tracking Poilievre were reporting they were being blocked from asking questions. They posted a video of an unidentified man physically pushing photographers and reporters away from Poilievre’s media event.
Poilievre also got into a bit of trouble during his housing policy announcement by making some creepy comments about women whose “biological clocks were ticking.” He also seemed to slip back into his previous apple-eating persona while talking about the size of the crowd at his recent rally.
Saturday, April 5 - #HandsOff
This weekend was the big day of protest in the US organized by the 50501 movement. They say they had as many as three million people out in protest of the Trump administration. Their next protest is planned for April 19 and they are also preparing for a general strike of as many as 11 million people.
If seeing mass mobilization and people taking to the streets cheers you up, I’ve put together the following lists of links collected from three different social media platforms. You may find this uplifting. I know I did.
Threads fans:
https://www.threads.net/@vincedmonroy/post/DIEicyTpkS3?xmt=AQGzKx1RDVRMWX1Vci8IG9MLO5kX-fQ9iEVu6hU2h-F11A (best poster ever?)
https://www.threads.net/@popcultureist/post/DIARWuYyo8t?xmt=AQGzKx1RDVRMWX1Vci8IG9MLO5kX-fQ9iEVu6hU2h-F11A (bonus - burning a Tesla in effigy)
Mastodon fans:
https://mstdn.ca/deck/@JEmphatically/114286371296953523 (link to full video of speeches in Washington, DC)
https://mstdn.ca/deck/@Bodling@deacon.social/114286335456459251
https://mstdn.ca/deck/@HelloIt_sMe45@lgbtqia.space/114286328205431050
https://mstdn.ca/deck/@srbsmk.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy/114286283242005978
https://mstdn.ca/deck/@PattyHanson@mastodon.social/114286395937304428
https://mstdn.ca/@realcraigdmorrison.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy/114286352211803818
https://mstdn.ca/@indivisibleteam@mastodon.social/114286485356221337
https://mastodon.social/@ASegar/114286442118897018
https://mstdn.ca/@JEmphatically/114288418643238148
https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4gekmgnal7iezk6gmpak53x7/post/3lm44igruns27
https://oldbytes.space/@thatKomputerKat/114288319404063257
https://me.dm/@JacquelineJannotta/114288332847872323
https://theatl.social/@bayport/114287675952251371
https://hachyderm.io/@lochnix/114288439949103490
Bluesky fans:
Gotta say, the sign game was good on Saturday. Probably the best I've seen in a while.
But with people being rounded up and deported without even a court hearing, this is no time to be polite and obedient. US friends, you are under authoritarian rule now. Your democracy is on life support. You’re going to need a big jolt to get this thing back on its feet.
Rooting for you!
Best reads this week:
Western Defeatism: A Real Threat to Conservative Fortunes and National Unity by Jared Wesley
A War is Coming … Where Will the Blow Fall First? By Malcolm Nance (scariest read by far)
Trump’s denial of Mexico’s Colorado River request sparks concerns over future water negotiations
The tug-of-war between Trump and the press in the Columbia Journalism Review
The Panama Canal’s other conflict: Water security for the population and the global economy
Finding Hope And Spring On Transgender Day Of Visibility by Erin Reed
Choosing Lawlessness by Judd Legum
The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come (gift link)
Best listens this week:
He Was Deported by Administrative Error. We Talked to His Lawyer. - Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick
NDP MLA David Shepherd in the Alberta legislature - On Danielle Smith
Other sources used:
https://www.conservative.ca/poilievre-announces-canada-first-reinvestment-tax-cut/
https://globalnews.ca/news/11104894/alberta-premier-florida-trip/
https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-citizens-arrest/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/liberal-judge-wins-wisconsin-supreme-021658709.html
https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-el-salvador-immigration-dd4f61999f85c4dd8bcaba7d4fc7c9af
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/04/president-trumps-bold-trade-action-draws-praise/